Four

One early morning in late June, Ted takes the train to Gatwick Airport and waits. And waits and waits, then waits some more. Finally, he calls Helen’s mother, collect, who tells him that her daughter has flown into Heathrow the day before and is staying at the Russell Square Hotel, just as they had planned. Ted knows that this was definitely not the plan. He’d paid for his room at Mrs. Farley’s through the end of the month and the Russell Square was way too posh for their budget, but Helen’s mother is high-strung and prone to great anxieties, so he just thanks her and returns to London, concerned about how this turn of events may play out.

Huffing up the stairs of the Russell Square station, Ted braces himself for what he might encounter at the hotel. The tail end of an orgy, most likely. Overturned champagne bottles and overflowing ashtrays, Helen swinging upside down from the chandelier in fishnets and stilettos, snorting coke off the taut belly of a stripper. He’d actually seen her do that, once, in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. But he walks right past her in the lobby having a cup of tea. In a demure pink dress, pearls, sensible shoes, white gloves and one of those weird little hats, like a box of expensive candy perched at a gravity-defying angle that complements her new prim and oh-so-proper hairdo, Helen looks like a completely different person from her former medusa-haired, mini-skirted, hell-raising self. In fact, in her new Sloane Ranger get-up, Ted thinks she almost resembles Diana, the Princess of Wales.

Ted’s first and somewhat hopeful thought is that this must be the opening act of some kinky role-playing scenario. Regrettably, it is nothing of the kind. Helen explains that her new wardrobe is one of several alterations that she’s made recently to the fabric of her life. She looks forward to telling him all about them when they have the time, which isn’t at this moment, because they have a train to catch in, let’s see, slightly less than an hour and a half. Since Ted thought they’d be sticking around for a few days, he hadn’t even begun to pack. Fortunately, Mrs. Farley’s isn’t that far away.

When he returns to the hotel with his backpack, Helen is out front, still in her Princess Di outfit, with a large sky-blue suitcase and matching round hatbox sitting on the curb beside her. The suitcase had been designed by someone who’d heard that people might want to roll their heavy luggage instead of rupturing themselves, but who never got around to field-testing the prototype before going into mass production. It has metal wheels the size of dimes and is so perfectly unbalanced, so poorly conceived from a center of gravity point of view, that when anyone tries to pull it with the tiny leather strap, or just looks at it harshly, it topples right over. Ted gives it a heft. It’s ridiculously heavy, as if it’s full of kilos of hashish or a set of encyclopedias. Knowing Helen as he does, either is equally possible.

Their train is scheduled to leave in eighteen minutes from Victoria Station, which is four miles away. It is a stretch to think they can make it, but over the last six months Ted has learned that British trains rarely, if ever, leave on time. He also knows how completely balls-up London traffic is at this time of day and suggests that they take the Tube, but not strongly enough because Helen insists on getting in one of the city’s famous black taxis. Their driver is a chatty little Cockney, a former jockey who claims, somewhat outrageously, that he’s been the subject of a documentary film since he was seven years old. His stories are amusing but do little to reduce Ted’s growing irritation with Helen, who is visibly enjoying their snail crawl past famous landmarks besieged by hordes of tourists.  She even mugs for their cameras.

The traffic comes to a complete halt near the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben tolls two o’clock. “Our train is leaving right now,” Ted observes waspishly.

“So what?” Helen responds. “There are others.”

“Not one that will get us to Dover in time to take the hovercraft. And you know how much I want to do that.”

“We can take the ferry now and take that ridiculous thing on the way back.”

“But the ferry takes more than twice the time. We’ll miss our connecting train to Paris.”

“There are others of those, too.”

“We won’t get in until very late,” he grumbles.

“This isn’t a race. You’re being very uptight. Relax.”

“You know telling me to relax has exactly the opposite effect, right?

The taxi driver makes eye contact with them in the rearview mirror. “Have you two loves been married long?” he asks.

“No!” they yell simultaneously.

Ted quietly gives Helen a piece of his mind, a large, aggrieved slice, when they pull up at Victoria long after their train has left. Helen laughs it off, which makes Ted’s brain begin to boil. He stalks off and trades in some traveler’s cheques for a thick stack of over-priced francs at the currency exchange; the way things are going, he thinks, it’ll be very handy to have some cash. They catch the next train, which leaves an hour later.

They settle into their seats as the train begins to accelerate past the mingy back gardens and sprawling coal yards of South London. The carriage is packed full of what appears to be a Japanese tour group, one of whom points a video camera at Ted. He glares at the man, then looks away.

“See,” Helen remarks. “I told you it would be no problem.”

“You know how much I hate last minute surprises.”

“Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but life is full of them. You’ll give yourself an aneurysm if you don’t learn to go with the flow.”

“That doesn’t mean that you should go out of your way to make more for no good reason!”

“You need to chill out. This isn’t the way to begin our adventure.”

“You think?”

The conductor arrives and punches their tickets. After he leaves, Ted takes out his copy of the itinerary. He asks Helen for the reservation numbers of their hotel in Paris, so he can copy them down.

“I’m so glad you brought that up,” Helen says. “That’s one of the changes I alluded to back at the hotel. We no longer have an itinerary.”

He holds up the sheaf of papers. “What do you mean? I have it right here.”

Helen grabs them out of his hand and tears them into little pieces.

“Why did you do that?” he asks.

“For your own good, and mine,” she says. “A couple of weeks ago, I realized that we made a big mistake planning everything to the nth detail. It’s much better to embrace spontaneity, to make decisions in the moment, as opportunities present themselves. After all, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, life’s about the journey, not the destination.”

“Emerson didn’t write that. You’re thinking of T.S. Eliot. Emerson wasn’t big on traveling, especially in Europe; he called it a fool’s errand.”

“He also wrote that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, didn’t he?”

“Little minds, not small. But he wasn’t trying to go to Paris during summer tourist season! And it’s not like destinations are unimportant. In fact, without some sense of where you’re going and why, it’s all too easy to wander about aimlessly or get lost. Besides, when I took you up on your offer, I thought you’d be attending to details that we’d agreed to and not making arbitrary executive decisions on your own.”

“There’s nothing random about my decision-making,” she huffs. But for once, Ted doesn’t feel like arguing over the meaning of words, even though...